poetry

                      The Coast Guard hut flew a blue flag             when the water blew thick and dark, but you were inured to the pleasures   … Read More

              (After Child Ballad 23: Judas) I saw my sister swikele woman beside the road robes ripped and torn from nights in the thicket. I was taxed by travel – treacherous flesh seduced by … Read More

              (After Child Ballad 12: Lord Randall)   The facts are that the mute girl with the mismatched eyes lived in the greenwood, slicing eels from gills to anus, fingering silvered slits, pulling on … Read More

  Hardy’s heart was, upon his death, removed from his body at his request. The rest of him buried in Poet’s Corner, but his heart was buried with his first wife, Emma, dead sixteen years. Thick veined muscle, held in … Read More

  Twilight now, and the night school teacher sits beneath the great chart of the periodic table in the chemistry classroom the overcrowded college across the street has rented and assigned to his section of English Composition. Tonight, the moments … Read More

  Wisteria snaps another wooden slat on the arbor. In the kitchen doorway, buttoning a worn cuff,             you say, Stop at Finest, I need more—             but our daughter … Read More

  Men drive us to suicide,             children pull us back. I’d have more             If it weren’t too late. Where fertility ends,             futility … Read More

  Must be mid-morning, the even light hitting the young woman’s forehead straight on through a window we can’t see. She’s reading a letter, been stuck on the first third of the page for more than three hundred years. Behind … Read More

  The Delaware’s a greenish black river here, flanked by other, slower rivers—fields of snow, rows of leafless sycamores larger than God, two shoulderless snaking roads. I’m in the truck on my way to buy a beast from a man … Read More

              After Simonides, frag. 543   Who locked us, child, inside this cunning chest, left to the stirring sea, the night-lit deep? Should I be glad you’ve finally gone to sleep? Should I, too, … Read More

  The nurses pass like wisps of blue cloth brandishing syringes of colorful liquids. They say this is for pain or this is for vermillion or this is for dragon. They know my smile means I stopped caring days ago. … Read More

              —after Kiki Dimoula   The goat was bleating so much its voice had grown hoarse. Furious, I opened the oven door: “Knock it off. Our company can hear you.” “But it isn’t even … Read More